Young Adult

I’m not really sure where to start with this movie. I’ll start off by saying that the acting was very strong, nothing to really complain about there. I didn’t like this movie because it was depressing as hell. Now I’m sure that just made some tempers flare and I may have lost some credibility because I can’t just not like a movie because it’s depressing, right? Wrong. Let’s clear something up before I go on. I don’t only like movies where everything turns out okay in the end, I don’t base my enjoyment of a movie off of how I feel at the end of it. However, this movie is somewhat of an exception. I didn’t like this movie, and it had a lot to do with how shitty I felt after watching it. Charlize Theron did a fantastic job of making me despise her character five minutes into the movie. I would have liked this movie if I had felt differently by the end of the movie, but if anything, I hated her even more at the end. I felt like this movie told the story of a shitty person who experiences different scenarios that should have helped her realize the error of her ways, but ultimately don’t have any effect on her. She’s the same terrible person at the end of the movie that she is in the beginning. She struggles to move on from the past, and by the end of the movie has a ton of reasons to but she doesn’t. That’s why I didn’t like this movie. You can kick and scream and say that a movie doesn’t have to have resolution to be good, and you’re entitled to my opinion, but I didn’t like this movie because the main character is presented with significant character flaws that still consume her personality at the end of the movie. The reason I didn’t rate this lower is because of the acting. I never once doubted any of the characters; the acting was very convincing throughout, although it’s possible that I was preoccupied with hating the shit out of most of the characters in the movie and didn’t notice any subpar acting. I strongly believe that if you’re going to make a movie depressing, there should be a reason for doing so. There should be some message, or something to think about, not just “wow this girl is really shitty.” I would summarize this movie like this, “terrible person leads terrible life, tries to do something terrible, fails, but continues being terrible.” There’s nothing to learn from that. The moral of the movie is that there are shitty people in the world, which I didn’t need to pay $12.50 and waste 2hrs of my life to find out. I applaud the cast but condemn the director for creating a pointlessly depressing film. Maybe the writer is trying to make a point about some people’s inability to grow up, or he’s taking a stab at romantic comedies that have likable characters and end happily. Either way, I still didn’t like this movie.